It’s All About the
User…and Other
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Facts You Can’t Ignore 1
T
echnology moves at an alarmingly fast clip.
It’s All About the Even more alarming, however, is the speed
User…and Other at which applications can become obsolescent.
Blink, and you might miss something—but no
Facts You Can’t worries. The next innovation is already here.
Ignore
This is reality today for all online users. Having grown
accustomed to the rapid pace of technology development,
we have lost the last vestige of tolerance for slow load
times. We are a community on the go, using tablets and
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smart phones and social networks to access what we This is where NGINX excels. NGINX and NGINX Plus
want, when we want, from wherever we are. The faster provide a powerful, nimble and affordable way to
we move, the faster we expect applications to perform. supercharge application performance. Deployment is
And anything that makes us wait too long can—and will— easy; simply drop NGINX into your stack, and you’re free
be replaced. to focus your attention on what matters.
Competitive advantage, therefore, belongs to the Need more convincing? Here are a few
company with the right combination of innovation
facts that hammer the point home.
and performance. Customers want exciting features, on
the platforms of their choice. But if you can’t deliver the
performance necessary to keep your users engaged, you
will lose them—no matter how innovative your online
services are. Bottom line: Application performance
and indeed, application survival—is all about serving
at the pleasure of the user.
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FACT: Users are in charge.
This can be a tough pill for some vendors and Web
developers to swallow. You put countless hours performance is
into the creation of content and features user experience.
because you know that those elements are in
Fast page load
demand. You’ve done your research. That’s why
time builds trust
you’re offering these features, right? Because
in your site; it
people want what you have. And doesn’t that
make you in charge?
yields more
returning
Nope. visitors, more
users choosing
your site over a
competitor’s site,
and more people
trusting your
1
http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/01/web-performance-is-user-experience.html brand.1
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It doesn’t matter how awesome your features are or what
kind of functionality you provide. It doesn’t matter how
you market it or what kind of investment you’ve made.
If you can’t quickly and reliably get that content in front
of users, on the devices they regularly use and at the
times they want to use them, no one will believe you’re
awesome. Users ultimately decide which sites to visit
Users expect or apps to use based on what they can get to when it
counts. Understand, of course, that you’re never in the
pages to load clear from this expectation. If you can handle initial traffic
in two but can’t scale to meet user needs when your content
seconds, and goes viral, you’re in trouble as well. Success can be as
damaging as failure, and your application only has one
after three opportunity to impress.
seconds, up to You are, therefore, at the mercy of your
40% of users users. You must understand and meet
will abandon their expectations.
your site.1
1
http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/01/web-performance-is-user-experience.html
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FACT: Performance is power.
however, we use apps everywhere on many types of
devices. More importantly, we rely on these apps beyond
the workplace to manage our personal lives all day long.
So what is it that users want?
This is how we communicate, operate, educate, and
Speedy performance. Recent research suggests that 47% socialize. If a site fails to respond when we need it—
of consumers expect a web page to load in less than two especially if we’re on a mobile device—we won’t hesitate
seconds. Even worse, 40% will completely abandon a site to ditch that one and look for one that works. Consider,
if load time exceeds three seconds, turning elsewhere for for example, how many websites are styled to look like
what they need. 1 Many times, that means settling for mobile applications for the sake of appearance. But
something inferior in terms of content or functionality— consider as well how that immediately sets a user’s
but that won’t matter if it loads quicker. Something is expectation that the site will operate like an application.
always better than nothing. That’s why every fraction of a Button clicks elicit immediate results—not two-second
second counts. The seemingly inoffensive difference page load times. And while users may be more forgiving
between an app that loads in 1.2 seconds and one that on a desktop, where they can multitask and swap
takes 2.1 seconds is more than it appears. A 100% between applications or browser tabs, mobile devices are
difference in load time is never minor. much more compromised. There’s no room for a user to
do two things at once. In other words, if they have to
Accessible performance. Once upon a time, we only
wait, they will go elsewhere.
needed accessibility to applications at the office—where
competition was usually between a few clunky products
that took their time doing what we asked. (And we didn’t
really care because, frankly, it was just for work.) Today,
1
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
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These expectations clearly
demonstrate that strategic and
competitive advantage belongs
to the company that can get its
app to perform for the user first.
Only 16%
of users
will give a
mobile app
more than
two tries to
1
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/12/users-have-low-tolerance-for-buggy-apps-
only-16-will-try-a-failing-app-more-than-twice/
perform.1
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FACT: Business survival
depends on application
delivery.
A one second
delay in page Performance does more than affect what users
think of you—it can affect your entire business.
load time can In fact, slow load time and performance has
result in 11% been proven to:
fewer page Decrease page views. The fewer users that can get to your
views, 16% content, the less traffic you’ll see. Those users will go
elsewhere. Period.
decreased
customer
satisfaction
and 7% lost
conversions.1
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Kill customer satisfaction. With little to no tolerance for Accelerate obsolescence. If traffic falls, loyalty dwindles,
lag times, users will be turned off by slow performance. sales crash, and revenues shrink, the outlook for your
In fact, if forced to wait even one extra second, customer application or site is not good. Technology becomes
satisfaction can drop by 16%.2 Over time, this doesn’t just extinct when it can be easily replaced by something
mean users will avoid your content. Dissatisfied users faster and better.
often grow a blanket distrust for an entire brand, which
can have lasting repercussions.
Lower your search engine ranking. That’s right. Google We live in an era of fast
now incorporates page load time into its search rankings, commoditization. If you can’t
making poor performance an ongoing issue that affects
deliver content, you can’t serve
how you will be seen and searched for by users.
your customers.
Cost you money. A single second delay can drop-kick
your conversions by 7 percent. For an e-commerce site
bringing in $100,000 per day, that can cost $2.5M in
lost sales each year.3 Sites or apps that are revenue-
generators can suffer inexorably from each millisecond
they fall behind.
2
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
3
http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-
blog/2012/mar/19/attention-span-internet-consumer -
http://www.theguardian.com/media-network/media-network-
blog/2012/mar/19/attention-span-internet-consumer
3
http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/?wide=1
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Say yes to your users
Once you accept that it’s all about the users—
attracting them, serving them, and pleasing
them—your task is to ensure that your web site
or application can meet their needs consistently.
NGINX and NGINX Plus are designed to improve
the user experience of your applications—
accelerate page transfers, absorb flash floods
of traffic, load-balance around failed or
underperforming servers and deliver
consistently excellent performance.
Many people know NGINX as an alternative high-
performance webserver, but NGINX can also act as an
application acceleration toolkit. Simply drop it in front of
an existing stack, and it can help you:
Speed up. Because it offloads the big tasks from the front-
end, and intelligently routes traffic to the back end, NGINX
makes your web pages load exponentially faster. Users
aren’t forced to wait, which means there’s no need for
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them to flee to your competitors. And the faster you can an app to generate revenue, NGINX can help you protect
serve content, the more users you can handle. In fact, and enhance that profit channel by providing users with
NGINX can help you deliver apps to 10 times as many the reliable speed and accessibility they’ve come to
users—which builds greater customer satisfaction. demand from today’s technology.
Respond faster—for less. You don’t need some complex Today’s online users are savvy but impatient—and
and expensive solution to make your site perform better. that’s okay. User impatience, after all, has spurred
Truth be told, those feature-heavy hardware solutions can tremendous innovation over the years.
actually make your site lag! NGINX is about simplicity. No
matter what type of infrastructure you have, you can drop Unfortunately, many companies forget that
NGINX in for an instant performance boost that’s easily impatience also breeds unhappiness. In that sense,
scalable. This “no harm” approach doesn’t affect your performance always precludes functionality. First
environment but can immediately reduce infrastructure and foremost, to keep users satisfied with what you
costs by cutting the complexity. provide and prevent them from turning elsewhere,
Preserve revenues. If slow load times can negatively affect you must never keep them waiting. NGINX can help.
sales, faster load times can help you eliminate that risk—
There’s a reason why NGINX is the web server of
and actually increase conversions. Some research shows
choice for the top 10,000 busiest websites on the
that conversion rate can jump by as much as 74% “when
Internet today. NGINX Plus provides a powerful,
page load time decreases from 8 seconds to 2
nimble and affordable way to supercharge
seconds….”4 In other words, if your company uses a site or
application performance, so that you can spend time
delighting your users. Take it for a test drive with the
4
http://conversionxl.com/11-low-hanging-fruits-for-increasing-website-speed-
and-conversions/#., NGINX Plus Free Trial. Learn more at nginx.com.
http://www.mcrinc.com/Documents/Newsletters/201110_why_web_performanc
e_matters.pdf
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Nginx, Inc. offers advanced Internet infrastructure software
that enables companies to match increasing demand for
faster web experiences at scale. Nginx offers two solutions:
NGINX is the popular open source software powering much
of the world's largest and fastest websites; NGINX+ is a
commercial offering that includes all the power and scale of
NGINX, plus additional, enterprise-class features such as
application balancing, health checks, activity monitoring,
on-the-fly configuration, and support.
NGINX is a registered trademark of Nginx Inc. NGINX Plus is a registered trademark of Nginx Inc.
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